Agile/Scrum, Lean Startup, LeanUX, business model canvasses and growth hacking have expanded our range of tools, methodologies and vocabularies. They don’t specifically call out product management, though. So are product managers obsolete?
We’re filling product owner slots internally, without much regard to skills or long-term success. Or leaving these slots open for development teams to fill as they may. That’s a road to market failure. We need to be thoughtful, intentional and organizationally savvy about picking and mentoring product owners.
Silicon Valley Agile Leadership Network (SV-ALN) is hosting a talk by Rich Mironov on “Scaling Product Management/Owner Teams” on Tuesday, June 10th at LinkedIn (Mountain View). We’ll talk about the overlap and differences between agile product management and product ownership; failure modes at revenue software companies; and some organizational maps for scaling up product teams for large commercial offerings.
Motivating our development teams may be as important for product managers as writing good requirements. A first step is understanding what matters to devs, such as knowing that real users run/appreciate our products.
This talk from Product Camp Portland paints the need to formally identify product owners for each agile team, select POs thoughtfully, train/mentor them, and create very strong ties to portfolio-level product management.
An April 4th talk at Cisco: “Product Managers, Product Owners, and Scalable Models for Agile Product Teams.” On large, multi-team commercial products, what skills do various product owners need? How do we connect that back to product-level strategy and priorities?
How do we understand value from the customer’s point of view, not just the vendor? How do we choose pricing units, what portion of value can we capture, and why do we have to do the math/thinking in advance for customers?
Focusing on skills rather than titles, how do we avoid product manager/owner failure modes for revenue (commercial) software? And why do revenue software companies hire product managers, when agile development teams are looking for product owners?
SynerZip and AgileDFW sponsored this webinar:
– What is a product manager, and how does this map to Agile’s product owner role?
– Where do we find/how do we train such folks?
– What about distributed teams?
Completing a three-post skills model for product owners, partly borrowed from product management… For some projects, product owners need market-facing skills as well as core agile practices (release/sprint planning, story writing, prioritization, backlog grooming). They *may* need to tell economic stories, segment users, design incentives and take a portfolio-level view.